Event at San Francisco on 1/16/04. Laughing Sal in the south of market warhouse that belongs to a recently deceased wealthy collector. This is from the old amusement park Playland-at-the-beach, which closed many years ago.
Liz Mangelsdorf/ The Chronicle MANDATORY CREDIT FOR PHOTOG AND SF CHRONICLE/ -MAGS OUT

Photo: LIZ MANGELSDORF

Event at San Francisco on 1/16/04. Laughing Sal in the south of...

Laughing Sal's new home at the beach / Santa Cruz Boardwalk pays $50,000 to bring S.F. icon south

Laughing Sal from San Francisco's long-dead Playland-at-the-Beach, after three decades of cushy lounging in a private collector's museum, will have to start working for a living again.

The Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk said Friday that it had outbid several suitors for the busty, guffawing icon. The amusement park paid $50,000, a figure far beyond Sal's original price in her glory days of 1940: $360.

The 5-foot-high freckled wooden woman is expected to begin belting out her skull-jarring cackle at the Boardwalk sometime this summer.

The late John Wickett purchased Sal for his private South of Market museum after the Playland amusement park closed in 1972. The museum is shedding its collection, and Wickett had requested that Sal be sold to someone who would display her publicly.

Not necessarily in San Francisco, though, allowing the Boardwalk to ace out several suitors for one of the estimated dozen Sals still in captivity -- including one at the Musee Mecanique on Fisherman's Wharf that may or may not have been Playland's first-string Sal. "Since 1907, San Francisco has been coming to Santa Cruz to recreate at the beach," Lipton said. "Unfortunately, San Francisco did not preserve Playland. So the Boardwalk is maintaining the tradition of letting the people see Sal the way she should be."

Yet Sal's trail continues to be littered with innuendo about whether the Wickett Sal is the original Playland gal or just a FrankenSal amalgamation of original and re-created parts.

In March, The Chronicle reported that longtime San Franciscan David Cherry had come forward with the long-missing head of a Laughing Sal. Cherry said he had seen it ripped off Sal's body shortly before Playland was razed to make room for beachfront condominiums. Cherry purchased it several years later and kept it in captivity until "the right time," as he put it.

Cherry maintains that the Wickett Museum's Sal body actually has a faux head and that his is the original. Museum officials say they are confident their Sal has her original laugh hole.

The Sal head controversy caused a few bidders to drop out, Wickett Museum officials said. But not the Boardwalk.

"We have gone over the pedigree of our Laughing Sal, and we are confident that this is her original head," Lipton said.

Boardwalk employees greeted Sal like the latest "It Girl" when she was wheeled off the truck last Saturday. They mugged for photos with her and watched her gingerly carted inside.

Though one of San Francisco's Sals has left town, there's a seemingly bottomless pit of Salaholics wanting more.

CDs of Sal's laugh continue to sell over the Internet. And in July, her tortured and twisted history is scheduled to be part of the premiere exhibition of the San Francisco Museum and Historical Society, "Amusing America," near the Musee at Fisherman's Wharf.

But Sal's sale last week has created some disappointment among the also- bidders. One is Richard Tuck, who wanted Sal as the centerpiece of a shrine to amusement parks that he's building in El Cerrito, dubbed "Playland-Not-at-the- Beach."

"It would have been very special for us," said Tuck, who hopes to open by Labor Day in a 2,321-square-foot space in the back of his executive search firm.

But he has a backup Salvation plan: He's commissioned an artist to build another Laughing Sal who will do things the original couldn't, such as winking slyly at a bystander.

Said Tuck: "People will look at it and think they're in the Twilight Zone. "

Just as people in 1940 might have thought had they known Laughing Sal would sell in the 21st century for $50,000.